This disclosure relates generally to clinical workflow, and more particularly to a design of a method configured to aid in enhancing clinical workflow.
In a caregiving facility, such as a hospital, and more particularly, in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU), it may be desirable to provide artificial ventilation to a majority of patients. Patients are ventilated in order to treat and manage respiratory failures, such as asthma, pneumonia, pulmonary edema, pulmonary embolism, chronic bronchitis, post-operative hypoxemia, chest injuries and chronic lung disease. Along with patients suffering from respiratory failure, certain patients may need ventilatory support for other medical reasons. By way of example, post-operative ICU patients and certain maxillofacial surgical patients may also require a period of post operative care/management in the ICU, during which time the patients are typically kept sedated and ventilated.
Traditionally, artificial ventilation is provided via use of a ventilator. More particularly, artificial ventilation is provided via positive pressure ventilation, where gas is delivered under positive pressure, allowing alveoli expansion and gas exchange. It may be noted that artificial ventilation may include invasive ventilation, non-invasive ventilation, or a combination thereof. Once a patient has been identified as needing invasive ventilation, the patient may be intubated and placed on a ventilator and ventilated using positive pressure.
Alternatively, the patient may be non-invasively ventilated. Non-invasive ventilation may be used to refer to the delivery of mechanical ventilation using a facemask or other similar devices as opposed to the use of an endotracheal tube in invasive ventilation. Non-invasive ventilation (NIV) is being increasingly used to circumvent complications caused by invasive ventilation, such as infections and/or airway trauma.
As will be appreciated, during artificial ventilation, such as NIV, the patient may stop breathing for a period of time. Spontaneously breathing patients may often breathe in an accelerated fashion and slow their breathing or even temporarily pause breathing. There are specific clinical conditions such as Cheynes-Stokes breathing that result in amplification of this type of breathing. It may be desirable to deliver backup breaths if this period exceeds a predetermined period of time, where the predetermined period of time may include a backup rate.
Currently available techniques that implement a backup rate unfortunately account for these varying breathing patterns in a sub-optimal manner. More particularly, the currently available techniques are intolerant of pauses in the breathing patterns of patients as these techniques are configured to deliver the initial backup breath exactly one breath period after the last trigger. Furthermore, the implementation of the backup breaths in the presently available techniques disadvantageously results in clinicians setting the backup rate to a very low value. This increases the chance of patients becoming asynchronous with the ventilator or getting un-needed and uncomfortable backup breaths. Moreover, if the patient truly becomes apneic and stops breathing, presently available techniques will not deliver a sufficient number of backup breaths for proper ventilation.
It may therefore be desirable to develop a design of a method that may be configured to advantageously aid in the smart delivery of backup breaths, thereby minimizing patient discomfort and enhancing clinical workflow. More particularly, it may be desirable to delay the onset of a first backup breath, thereby allowing the patient to temporarily pause breathing.